skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> though there are some reports that the stocks were bought on margin, which makes it more(?) okay, I guess?

https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20Custo...

4. Liquidation. In the event of the death of the Customer, or in the event the margin in any account in which the Customer has an interest shall in either Robinhood’s or the Introducing Broker’s discretion become unsatisfactory to either Robinhood or the Introducing Broker, or be deemed insufficient by either Robinhood or the Introducing Broker, Robinhood is hereby authorized; (a) to sell any or all securities or other property which Robinhood may hold for the Customer (either individually or jointly with others); (b) to buy any or all securities and other property which may be short in such accounts; and/or (c) to cancel any open orders and to close any or all outstanding contracts; all without demand for margin or additional margin, notice of sale or purchase, or other notice or advertisement, and that any prior demand or notice shall not be a waiver of its rights provided herein.

(emphasis added, and if you like that there's an arbitration agreement too.)

https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20Margi...

WE CAN SELL YOUR SECURITIES OR OTHER ASSETS WITHOUT CONTACTING YOU. Some investors mistakenly believe that their brokerage firm must contact them for a margin call to be valid, and that their firm cannot liquidate securities or other assets in their accounts to meet the call unless the firm has contacted them first. This is not the case. Although we may attempt to notify you of margin calls, we are not required to do so. However, even if we have contacted you and provided a specific date to meet a margin call, we can still take necessary steps to protect our financial interests, including immediately selling the securities without notice to you. We may forcibly liquidate all or part of your account without prior notice, regardless of your intent to satisfy a margin call, in order to protect your interests or our interests.

YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO CHOOSE WHICH SECURITIES OR OTHER ASSETS IN YOUR ACCOUNT(S) ARE LIQUIDATED OR SOLD TO MEET A MARGIN CALL. Because
the securities are collateral for the margin loan, we have the right to decide which security to sell in order to protect our interests.

WE CAN INCREASE “HOUSE” MAINTENANCE MARGIN REQUIREMENTS AT ANY TIME AND ARE NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE YOU ADVANCE WRITTEN NOTICE. These changes in policy often take effect immediately and may result in the issuance of a maintenance margin call. Your failure to satisfy the call may require us to liquidate or sell securities in your account(s).
> Reporters can't do that

Maybe the should be able to, then.
Last I checked, the SEC doesn't pay very well compared to financial law / trading...
Thank you, I totally misread that!
I definitely have more energy for personal projects when I’m not coding at work all day.
My point is that the comment should be deleted altogether as it's more of a personal rant than a serious answer.
https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1354839676482367488
As if an IRC channel wouldn't be shut down if it threatened oligopoly profits...
So we should roll over and take it?
Why are you assuming they can ever be profitable?

These aren’t businesses with well thought out revenue models.

They’re VC funded startups whose entire goal is to be bought out so the VCs can make a profit.

The business itself making a profit is not their problem.
And my sincere apologies for raining on your parade. Congrats again.
Citadel reloaded shorts before RH cut off gme and the rest

https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253315?s=2...
Yeah, I assume in reality, this is essentially the exact opposite what is happening. I would imagine the SEC is involved behind the scenes in coordinating these shutdowns.

That feels like a huge violation of their stated intent though.
SEC ‘Monitoring’ GameStop Frenzy as Warren Pressures Regulators
Rescue of the “Canadian Six”–A Classic Case of Deception
Gamestop is not supported on Robinhood. I get a message -- " This Stock is not supported on Robinhood"
Objectively speaking, capitalism is quite bad for a lot of people. Might be one of the best systems we've ever came up with, it's still quite bad and needs some fixing.
Real money for me, not for thee.
Update: Just got an email from Alpaca that even they are also stopping trading on some stocks.
The class action has already been filed against Robinhood. It remains to be seen if it gets any traction.
I think GME is one of the freebie stocks that Robinhood gives out as a referral bonus, so many of those users might just have had one stock incidentally.
They should be prosecuted for inciting violence, trespassing on government property. Not terrorism.
They just halted buying and are still allowing closing out of your position.
Honest question, why should market making organizations be allowed to take the upsides involved in their position but be able to avoid the downsides by just not doing the job they signed up for when they feel the risk is too high? The argument for why we allow these organizations to siphon money as a middle man is because they provide an important service and are taking on risk. But if they're allowed to bail when things actually get risky that's a lie and they're just leeching money. You made the analogy that their job is like vacuuming nickels in front of bulldozers in another thread, but if they can just leave when the bulldozers show up what they're actually doing is just vacuuming free nickels that other people dropped.

I know its pretty clear my current personal opinions on this topic lean rather hard in one direction but I am truly open to hearing the counter argument and could be convinced otherwise. Some of your posts here and in other threads have changed my view on other parts of this whole mess already so I'm asking because it seems like you're willing to discuss sanely.
>The conspiracy hypothesis might have legs if Citadel's asset management and market making arms colluded. Absent evidence, however, it's a suspicion at best.

Yeah, uh, they do that all the fucking time. It's a Soviet fiction that they keep a firewall between those two businesses.
https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-scrubs-thousands-of-dislik...
It can also take a while for a rating to go through. Once you tap the allotted stars you'd like to rate an app, you need to wait until you see the "Your feedback was submitted" modal to appear.
Preventing people from exiting an existing position is a much bigger deal than preventing them from entering a new one.
Discord is no longer banning r/WallStreetBets – it’s helping them
It doesn't get more organic than word of mouth.
Can you expand on "[The executives have] seen enough they don't like about full WFH"? I'm trying to gather enough anecdotal and "research-y" data to make decisions around this for myself and friends/co-workers.
> 4. What do they already know?

Yeah, I've found that this is what's most commonly overlooked when communicated with people at work. They either spend too much time explaining things you already know, or assume context you don't have.
Citadel doesn't own Robinhood.
A jail sentence for such a well positioned white collar criminal is probably comparable to a retreat lodge. Such an institution certainly doesn't have prison bars and a fenced perimeter because it is low security and has a special privilege.
‘Pirate’ Releases Recover from Historic Drop Caused by Scene Busts
Any lawsuit that said "you let me freely trade a stock and I lost money" would be laughed out of court.
Did they issue margin calls?
There doesn't seem to be any singular person in this case to assign such fault to; best I can tell the over-shorting was caused by multiple firms acting independently, and I'd guess that the orders were signed off on by multiple people at each firm (and I'm not inclined to suspect any collusion here; in a thunderstorm people sell umbrellas, and in a pandemic people short retail).

In the meantime, the billionaire owner of Citadel (the company that just made tons of money by front-running all these retail investor trades via their data harvesting contract with Robinhood) just used some of that freshly-acquired cash to buy a stake in Melvin (the company that those retail investors just tanked) for pennies on the dollar. The feel-good rage of WSB serves as a convenient smokescreen for the rich getting richer.
A stock trading app that encourages you to trade options, and then randomly(?) closes your positions should not only have a 1 star review, it should not be allowed to operate.

Actually, given that RH is currently only allowing people to sell their positions, and not buy into them, the only correct step is for the app stores to only allow RH to be uninstalled, and to block any new installations. All for the financial well-being of their users, of course.
That's referring to margin specifically, not a held position. There's a difference between margin trading and holding the stock in your name.
Steam (the video game distribution platform) does "recent reviews" and "all reviews" so that you can tell if there has been a recent influx of positive or negative reviews.
Ah, I've been waiting for this. "Boomers" get blamed, but we in Generation X are only marginally less guilty. Most of the biggest villains are indeed Boomers, simply because they've been at it longer and are the biggest players, but GenX behaves a lot like its parents do.

Not entirely. I like to think we're a little better. But we did get away with comparatively cheap college, used it to get reasonable jobs, and put that in retirement funds where exponential growth is starting to happen. We're still sitting in those jobs, and will be for a while.

I'm pretty sure that people blaming "Boomers" really meant Anybody Over 40 all along. So I've been kinda waiting for it to be my turn.
Yes, but it's not just about that.
The card is anonymous, but loading it with money is not, at least not in practice - most machines I've encountered only accept Maestro/VPay (which is an improvement over PIN, as they are marginally available in other countries, but they are also tied to your identity), so you are left with the service points at major train stations at best. Exceptions were more common in the Strippenkaart era.

At least that was the situation by late 2019/early 2020, as I have not been able to travel to Randstad since then for rather obvious reasons.
It's going to be real funny when all the lemmings pumping up GME's price lose all their money.
You mean people who bought a hot potato might be stuck owning it when the music stops? Make no mistake, the music will stop and someone will be left holding it. Might as well be the folks holding it right now.
e: I'm leaving my original comment below for posterity, but I learned upthread that I was substantially misinformed here. Robinhood accounts are by default margin accounts, and their documentation describes this in an incredibly misleading way (https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/robinhood-accou...):

> When you sign up for a new account, you’ll automatically start with a Robinhood Instant account, which is a margin account. This means you’ll have access to instant deposits and extended-hours trading. You also won’t have to wait for your funds to process when you sell stocks or make a deposit (up to $1,000).

I stand by my claim that margin accounts necessarily require forced liquidation, but this is pretty indefensible.

-----

If the stocks were bought on margin it's entirely non-objectionable. Forced liquidation is a well-known practice that's fundamental to margin accounts as a concept - without it, a margin account is just an unsecured loan, and nobody's going to offer the average margin trader a low-cost unsecured loan for stock speculation.
Lol look at my history and profile. I know lots of people are upset over losing money here, but that does not make me a shill or a bad person or even incorrect.
Differentiate posts/friends on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
When it's positive, it's called "trending"
I predict Google will whitewash their rating within a month.
This is a really bizarre comment, to me at least. The central point of travel in your post, particularly, as some sort of universal, valuable goal is an unfamiliar concept to me. Travel, along with what I'm guess most of what you consider as "intense and high-effort experiences" to do before "your life is over" after getting married and having kids I would probably categorize as the self-destructive and ultimately pointless pleasure seeking I'm advocating against. My point is the fact that you and most people consider this "desirable" is not good. If you think you should seek a great deal of pleasure before "ending" your life by becoming a responsible adult, my advice is to get addicted to heroin, as it will offer a far more intense pleasure than travel, or whatever else you mean.
Better to have 1 star and stay open than to be shutdown one way or another.

Music, taxis, retail, newspapers, politics and others have been disrupted by technology and the incumbents have suffered.

The establishment players have all seen this and they aren't going to let it happen again to them. They'll let technology in but only the way they want.

And now that deplatforming companies and powerful from credit-card, cloud providers, app stores, communications is normal and accepted they have more power and control than ever.

If I was robinhood I would do the same thing. Standing up for a principle is only going to get you shutdown and have everyone hate you after the fake news vilifies you and drags you through the gutter.
This is not mobbing the ratings. They did something bad, and they are getting bad reviews for it. The review system is working as intended.
I don't know if that's a positive, but companies like Google often cave to the mob and the press demanding deplatforming of certain individuals. If they remove the ratings then that will just prove, once again, what their allegiances are. Except now a lot of people are watching really closely.
Thousands (millions?) Of people lost money / opportunity because of the app. Then those people rate what they think of the app - that ir cannot be trusted to act in their interest.

Why should Google protect them against consequences of their own decisions?
I think it is ridiculous that Robinhood took the matters in their own hands to halt trading on GME. If anyone had to do this was the SEC. It is just outrageous.
a space plant?

whose leaves glitter in the void?

i think that's the meta.
One of the good things I see coming out of Robinhood blocking trading, Twitter and Reddit booting problematic users, Parler getting vaporized, etc. is a sudden realization amongst people of just how easily major parts of their lives can be instantly turned off by intermediaries.

My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
What 1970s technology is the smartphone a mere “incremental improvement” from?
I can say with 99% certainty that they aren't just counting invidual $GME holders, but every one of Robinhood users that holds an ETF (like total US Market) that contains $GME...

So this is really such a bad faith statement from Motherboard, because all of the ETF holders (probably 90% of the "half") can still sell their ETF's and thus their indirect $GME shares...
It's even hinted at in the article: "A significant connection between the parents’ level of education and entrepreneurship was also noted." The clickbait title confirming people's priors isn't surprising though.

If I had to guess at the causal graph it would something like:

smart -> income
smart -> entrepreneurship
entrepreneurship -> income
income -> entrepreneurship

And even without the last two connections the smart confounding variable would induce a relationship between income and entrepreneurship.
For pointers to other vertices of this story graph, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25933543.

As for this thread, it's got hundreds of comments. If you want to see them all you'll need to click through the More links at the bottom, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945447&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945447&p=3
On iTunes it is still rated 4.8, but they have a lot more ratings overall (2.4m vs 335k).
Baking in automatic crypto to email is a lost cause, since email is not as straight-forward as let's say Signal, which only succeeds because it exists in a monoculture (iOS/Android). Email operates on 100s of different clients (and operating systems), and you get people replying-to-all by mistake, and fat-fingering sensitive data to random recipients (which is possible in Signal, but not nearly as bad as e-mail where e-mail can exist in any hostile environment it wants, unlike Signal which has a user which is more careful about what he/she sends).
Only approved messages are now allowed on the large platforms. I predict they will "correct" the error.
Time for everyone to cash in their 401k's (aka the system where the middle class gives their life savings to the elites).

If there's this level of blatant corruption, who really thinks they won't get screwed out of their retirement savings in a few decades?
Seemed like one of the poorest attempts I have ever seen, is it really being treated as a serious one?
Exploited working class people who have no other choices I think you mean
But trading wasn't stopped. Avenues for non-professional investors to continue buying shares were cut off. They were still allowed to sell shares as desired.

I don't really have an opinion on whether the GME thing is a pump and dump scam, or a real opportunity to enforce a classic "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" lesson to those shorting these stocks.

But I do have a real issue with removing just the "buy" side of the equation. Price is always a function of supply and demand, and I don't understand how anyone could justify halting just buy orders. The obvious impact of artificially reduced demand is that the price will drop.

Further - if this price drop was designed to protect these firms from possible losses (and I don't really care whether that loss was by allowing unvetted shorts by investors who don't have the capital to cover, or whether it was collusion to protect other parties) then I still don't see how you can reasonably come to a conclusion that looks good for these firms here - They're manipulating stock prices to avoid losses.
You mean their investors?
Although they've left the tweet up, the article it links to says that this is incorrect: "Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that 56 percent of Robinhood users hold GME stock. This is incorrect, based on a misreading of a statistic on Robinhood. Motherboard regrets the error."
I'm curious to see what other changes come about in this new sometimes-remote world.

These days, most professional employees get a set amount of vacation time, lets say 20 days. In the previous system, if you wanted to fly halfway around the world to visit family or what-have-you, you might use half of those vacation days in one go. Now, if you're only expected to be in the office 1 day per week ("Meeting Monday"), you could take that same trip and use just 2 days of vacation, assuming you're working, or at least a making a passable semblance of working during the rest of that trip. Heck, you could take almost half of the Meeting Mondays for a year if you work the rest of the time.

In some sense, that's no problem. One of the big points of remote work is that it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you get your work done. But the reality is, those occasional in-person days seem to be very important for really connecting with teammates. If Nomad Ned seems to always be missing Meeting Monday but I can rely on Local Larry to be there, I may be much happier and feel more connected with Larry, even if they both take the same number of vacation days per year.

Between geopay, tax rules, wanting employees to be close enough to an office for in-person meetings or emergencies, etc, I think employers are going to become much more invasive in terms of tracking the locations of their employees going forward.
Related to this topic, from 2017

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808374
> We learned how inflation is a monetary phenomenon and tamed it with interest rates

Fix one mistake with another mistake? Plus, it's the other way around, interest rates cause more inflation (how else is the government going to pay its debts?). It's a cyclic phenomenon. Without interest, inflation would be a much less problem.

Secondly, freeing currencies from gold is another mistake because it allows the government to devalue its currency at will, we've see the chaos that comes out of it. Hopefully bitcoin and gang will fix that mistake, but we're already seeing the big banks not liking it because it will take away their power to control the people.

> We found that the Great Moderation promoted speculation in real estate, causing the GFC,

Which would have never happened if we were following proper economic laws which we've literally known about for over 1400 years. Mortages and selling debt for debt are both prohibited Islamically. We already know it's wrong, yet people keep engaging it it because a few rich and powerful will benefit at the expense of everyone else.

The solution is to go back to a sound economic system, not to anticipate the next crash because it's built in to how the modern system works.
Do you use ImageMagick for image generation? (I've had issues with it and am always looking for a replacement, but it just does SO much...) Do you do it yourself or via third party? What does your stack look like? Ruby on Rails and...?

I just retweeted you btw. Very impressive, actually even a little intimidating. I don't know if you're looking to be bought, but if you haven't had offers already, I'm sure they're coming your way soon
I had a good laugh reading this. Of course the irony is that the author, after having gone through the hellish process of learning the spec, didn't documented any of the code (in that file).
These people are leveraging everything in their power to fuck over millions to save themselves money. We put them away for 5 years and they still come out billionaires in the end, why wouldn't they do it?
When I was born, I was not a Christian.

In order to become Christian, I had to choose to accept God as my Dictator.

Later, I gave up the notion of God and Christianity, again by choice.

It's like putting yourself in a prison where you can leave any time you like. Are you still in prison? Likewise, is God really a dictator?
In practice, religions tend to have institutions that parse and interpret the text, and make a clear, unambiguous interpretation for a given situation.

So people might tell themselves they are doing a workaround, but it is not really valid from the point of view of the organized religious body.
I do understand. It's that you are basically going off on a pointless tangent.

It's like someone yells "Teh skie is falling". And you are correcting grammar errors. While comets rain down.
A margin call that liquidates a customer is not only perfectly reasonable but responsible on the part of the broker. I would never hold it against Robinhood to liquidate positions or have restrictions on buying/selling stocks where the broker could be at risk.

The problem is that Robinhood is selling positions that are fully covered by their clients as well as prohibiting the buying of shares even when the purchase is 100% covered by the user.

I've been in this industry for 15 years now, including obviously the great recession, the flash crash, brexit, and a host of highly volatile events resulting in massive market swings and this is absolutely unheard of. I've never seen a broker prevent its clients from buying shares or liquidating shares that are fully accounted for and pose no risk to the broker.
It's honest reviews though? I had a 5 star rating on the app and loved it. After what they've done today, I am switching brokers, and changed my review to 1 star. I would honestly no longer recommend Robinhood to anyone.